Since 13 October 2026, Tirana has lived through a daily cycle of student-led protests ending in tear gas, water cannon and clashes. On 17 October the Director General of the State Police publicly confirmed the use of rubber bullets as well, "in a limited manner". On the other side, the police report stones, fireworks and Molotov cocktails thrown at officers, a police station set on fire and more than a hundred officers injured within five days.
This article is not about the politics of the protest. It is about the law: what right is being exercised in the square, where it ends, when and how much force the police may use, and what a citizen who believes they were treated unlawfully can do. The facts reflect the situation on 22 October 2026, according to public reporting and official statements.
The right: peaceful assembly, without arms
Article 47 of the Albanian Constitution guarantees freedom of peaceful assembly without arms, and participation in it. Two words mark the boundary of the right itself: peaceful and without arms. Whoever throws a Molotov cocktail or a stone at the police is no longer exercising a constitutional right; they are committing a criminal offence and answer for it individually.
The second point, often forgotten in public debate, is that the violence of some does not strip protection from the others. The European Court of Human Rights has said so consistently, from Ezelin v. France (1991) to Kudrevičius v. Lithuania (Grand Chamber, 2015): a participant who personally commits no violent act may not be sanctioned, nor treated as violent, merely because others around them were. The police have a duty to distinguish.
In Albania a protest does not require a permit. Law No. 8773/2001 "On Assemblies" requires notification to the police by the organiser, not authorisation. In 2021 the Constitutional Court struck down the part of Article 262 of the Criminal Code that punished assembling "without first obtaining permission", as incompatible with Articles 17 and 47 of the Constitution. Lack of notification, by itself, does not make a protest unlawful and does not justify dispersing it by force, as long as it remains peaceful. The same law, in Article 19, prohibits taking part with a covered face.
The limitation: only by law and in proportion
Article 17 of the Constitution allows rights to be limited only by law, for a public interest or to protect the rights of others, and only "in proportion to the situation that dictated it". A limitation may not infringe the essence of the right and may in no case exceed what the European Convention on Human Rights allows. Strasbourg standards are therefore not an academic reference for an Albanian judge; they are the constitutional limit of every measure.
Public order is a legitimate interest. Protecting public buildings, officers and bystanders is a police duty. The legal question is not whether the police may intervene, but how and how much.
Force: Article 32 of Law No. 82/2024
One clarification is needed that is often missed even in public debate: Law No. 108/2014 is no longer in force. It was repealed by Law No. 82/2024 "On the State Police", adopted on 26 July 2024 and in force since September 2024, while the 2015 regulation was replaced by the new State Police Regulation, approved by Council of Ministers Decision No. 112 of 24 February 2025. The core rules on force survived, but they were redistributed between the law and the regulation, and anyone still citing Article 133 is citing a repealed text.
The new law defines the use of force itself (Article 3, point 11): action through physical force, armament, incapacitating agents and other means, "in a proportionate manner" and within the limits of Article 3 of the ECHR. The direct reference to the Convention means the Strasbourg standard is part of the statutory definition, not only a constitutional limit. Article 32 sets four rules:
- Force is used only when indispensable and only if all other measures have failed or are impossible.
- Force is used in a proportionate and graduated manner, selecting the necessary level.
- A warning is given before force is used and before any escalation, except where immediate force is needed to prevent a real and imminent danger.
- Force is always used in accordance with the legislation against torture and inhuman or degrading treatment and under the rules of the police regulation.
Two further articles complete the framework: under Article 10, point 2, an officer must identify themselves before starting to apply a measure against a citizen; under Article 11, every measure ends immediately once the danger has been averted.
The new Regulation (Article 25) contains what the old law had in its own text: the scale of means, from verbal persuasion to physical restraint, impact weapons, incapacitating agents, electric-shock devices, police dogs and firearms; the duty to give assistance, including medical assistance, to injured persons; warning groups as early as possible "so that participants are given time to leave"; means proportionate to the danger; and the individual accountability of the officer, who "answers before the law". Earlier orders of the Director General, such as the 2015 order on tear agents, apply only insofar as they do not conflict with the new law (Article 140, point 4), until replaced by the order that Article 10, point 5, assigns to the Director General on the order of escalation and the documentation of measures.
Four practical criteria follow from these texts, the same ones the Ombudsman (Avokati i Popullit) listed in his recommendation on the December 2020 protests: necessity, degree of threat, amount of force and its duration. Force that continues after a person has been subdued meets none of them. Striking a handcuffed person, or one held by two officers, is not force; it is punishment, and punishment is not a police competence.
Gas, water and rubber bullets under Strasbourg case law
The means used in recent days are not prohibited as such. The legal problem lies in how they are used.
On tear gas, the ECtHR in Abdullah Yaşa v. Turkey (2013) found a violation of Article 3 of the Convention where a canister was fired directly at protesters: firing in a flat trajectory rather than in an arc can cause serious injury or death and cannot be regarded as appropriate police action, even where the protest is not peaceful. The Court required clear rules and an ex post review of proportionality. In İzci v. Turkey (2013), gas used without warning and baton blows on a woman who was leaving led to violations of Articles 3 and 11.
For situations closer to ours, the Ombudsman has cited Gazioğlu v. Turkey (2011) and Süleyman Çelebi v. Turkey (2016): a violation of Article 3 where the applicant's injuries were not justified by the circumstances and force was exceeded only because "the protest had to be dispersed", and a further violation where the State made no serious effort to establish the circumstances, the cause of the injuries and the officers involved.
Rubber bullets have no specific provision in Albanian law; they fall under the "impact weapons" of Article 25 of the Regulation. That is precisely why the Ombudsman has announced a review of the legal basis for their use. In international practice, firing at the upper body, firing at close range and firing without an individualised target are considered unlawful use. The official confirmation of their use, given on 17 October, has at least one merit: it makes documentation of every instance mandatory, by whom, when and against whom.
Detainees and minors
After the protest comes the part that is seen least: detention. Article 28 of the Constitution gives the detained person the right to be informed immediately of the reasons, to communicate with a lawyer and to be brought before a judge within 48 hours. Article 25 prohibits any inhuman or degrading treatment, without exception.
The Ombudsman's preliminary findings from these days deserve attention, because they are on-site observations and not political statements: 118 people in the Security Block, including 6 minors; cells designed for one person holding three or four detainees; minors not separated from adults; complaints of violence "even after neutralisation"; and, in two police stations, officers without a visible identification number. The Albanian Helsinki Committee reported on 18 October that minors had been questioned without a psychologist and without a parent. According to official police figures cited by BIRN on 21 October, of 859 people arrested or prosecuted, 204 are minors.
For minors the law is special. The Juvenile Criminal Justice Code (Law No. 37/2017) requires immediate notification of a parent, the presence of a psychologist and a defence lawyer at every procedural act, custody separate from adults, and detention as a measure of last resort. Age does not exclude responsibility for a Molotov cocktail, but it changes the procedure entirely. A minor's statement taken without a parent and a psychologist is, in our assessment, unusable as evidence.
The identification number is not a formality. The new law makes it an express duty: under Article 10, point 2, the officer identifies themselves before applying a measure, and the new regulation (Article 8) provides for the individual identification number on the official badge. Without it, no complaint of excessive force can be individualised, and the investigation Strasbourg requires becomes impossible from the start.
What a citizen can do
Anyone who believes unlawful force was used against them, or that their rights were violated in detention, has four routes, which do not exclude one another:
- Document immediately. A medical examination with a written report within 24 hours, dated photographs of the injuries, names of witnesses, preservation of every video. Without these, every later procedure starts with no evidence.
- A complaint to the Police Oversight Agency (AMP), the body that investigates police misconduct, and a criminal complaint to the Prosecutor's Office for the relevant offence. The complaint should expressly request the identification of the officer and the preservation of station camera footage, as the Ombudsman has also demanded. The new law itself (Article 24) obliges the police to register, verify and answer every complaint.
- A complaint to the Ombudsman, who opened an administrative inquiry on 13 October under Articles 2, 3 and 11 of the Convention and accepts individual complaints.
- A civil claim for damages against the State, after or alongside the criminal proceedings, and, once domestic remedies are exhausted, an application to the ECtHR within the Convention's time limit.
For minors, a parent has the right to request immediately the file of procedural acts and to challenge any act carried out without their presence.
Responsibility runs both ways
Whoever throws a Molotov cocktail is protected by no article of the Convention and must answer before a court, with fair-trial guarantees. The police officer who detains that person acts lawfully. The police officer who strikes them after detention, who fires gas in a flat trajectory into a crowd, who holds minors in cells with adults or who serves without an identification number does not act lawfully, however violent the protest was an hour earlier.
The suspension of seven police officers, announced on 17 October after footage was published, shows that the accountability mechanism exists. Whether it works will be shown by the investigations that follow, not by the suspensions. As the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights said as early as December 2020, the policing of demonstrations must rest on communication, on distinguishing the violent from the peaceful, and on independent investigation of every allegation of excessive force. That standard has not changed.
The firm assists people detained or injured during protests and the families of prosecuted minors, from the first documentation to representation before the prosecutor, the court and the Ombudsman. Contact us as soon as possible after the events: evidence missing on the first day cannot be recovered later.
